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3.27.2015

Awesome Spring Break week

So the university's spring break was this week. Typically, that means the students are gone, but staff continue working and all is mostly quiet around the campus. But this week, for the first time in my six years of work there, I took the entire week as vacation. ... I was in desperate need of some me time, and -- as challenging as it was for me to ignore my university work for the week -- I took advantage of it. I had a glorious week.

Like I told Kates at the beginning of the week when she asked if still would take Faye to daycare each morning: I'm still going to work at 8. I'm just having a different kind of work day.

I spent almost all of Monday working in the yard, clearing brush and preparing the yard for spring. The weather was sunny with temperatures in the 70s. It was awesome.

Tuesday was quite the opposite. We had a wonderful thunderstorm roll in that produced some loud crashes at times, but the temperature also dipped considerably. The weather change reduced my mojo for work considerably and forced me to take on a lot of indoor work. But I was still productive, patching some cracks left in the walls from our foundation work last summer and continuing prep work on our new kitchen cabinets.

I took off Wednesday for a day of shopping. In all our years since moving from K-Town to The 'Ville, I have not set foot in a Menards store because the nearest one is nearly an hour's drive away -- until Wednesday. I made the drive in conjunction with some other stops I wanted to make and was overtaken with such excitement when I arrived that I could hardly stop smiling from the time I walked through the big sliding front doors. The store clerk who passed in front of me in the greeting area probably wondered if I was baked. (... That actually happened once. Years ago, my friend Jeff and I visited an electronics store in Madison, as part of a tour of the city during a day off from work. We were having a great time and, admittedly, were acting silly when a long-haired male store clerk pulled me aside, leaned in, looked me in the eyes and asked, “Dude, are you baked?” I laughed and answered, “No.” The embarrassed clerk apologized and I went on my way.)

Unfortunately, the temps have stayed cooler since Monday, and I've stayed in the rest of the week, continuing to take care of projects inside. Which is a good thing because they're are plenty of things to do -- that I can't focus on under normal conditions with two little girls running around the house.

I've never gotten in to watching “South Park.” But, boy, do ever I remember the craze as ‘The Spirit of Christmas” made its way the floor of my freshman dorm -- and laughing until my side hurt. Here's a good read about how it came to be.

While I missed the video of the “crying 'piccolo girl,” I did catch her appearance on Monday's “Tonight Show.” Jimmy Fallon's a swell guy for inviting her on the show, and the girl was a great sport about it. Plus, she's going to see Taylor Swift!

Here's a good read from Rolling Stone about “Glee,” which apparently put a wrap on its show Friday night. I learned that only when I noticed the tweets start to come in late Friday night with links to recap stories. ... Kates and I bowed out early in Season 2 -- another casualty of the infamous exploding TV and our chaotic lives that year -- but as the Rolling Stone article fairly points out, the series was starting to losing its direction at that point. All the reviews I read about what we were missing did nothing to pull me back in, nor did the insistence on themed shows. In the end, I had no idea it had moved to Friday nights.

It began eating its own tail, trying too hard to keep up with pop
culture references and hit songs in an attempt to stay on top of the
charts. Between Gaga-centric episodes and a lesson devoted entirely to
twerking (no, really), most of these attempts to soak in the mainstream
were ill-conceived. Worse, as Glee began to stray from its satirical roots, it found itself delving more and more into After-School Special territory.